White House chief of staff John Kelly spent this week in Bedminster, N.J., pondering changes in the West Wing, according to four White House officials. Kelly summoned aides to President Donald Trump’s golf club there to ask about their portfolios and make suggestions on how to make the West Wing communicate better and get more done, while giving people clear responsibilities and then holding them accountable. The role of chief strategist Steve Bannon has come under particular scrutiny in several conversations, particularly because he has a large staff, including an outside public relations expert, but no specific duties. In a number of

Most of the big media companies get hot and bothered whenever they grab hold of a news story or happening that looks like it might hurt President Trump. On the flip side, they do their best to ignore anything that could hurt the Democrats, the party that broke their hearts during the last election. Over the past few columns, I’ve mentioned areas where I think the press has fallen down on the job. In my humble effort to keep people — investors or not — informed, here’s another media failing: the alleged hacking of the Democratic National Committee computers. You

What is it these white boys are so angry about? You don’t go to a protest because you’re happy. You go to a protest because you are mad about something or, in my case, because it is your job. I suppose I have been to something close to a hundred of them over the years. I have also been the target of a couple. The idiot children of Yale protested a conference on freedom of speech at which I was speaking in 2015, part of a larger kerfuffle about Halloween costumes: A professor had criticized the university’s advice to avoid

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Baltimore removed its four Confederate monuments, including statues of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson. This action followed this weekend´s events in Charlottesville, Va., when white supremacists protested the removal of a Lee statue, and events this week, when protesters vandalized Confederate statues in Durham, N.C., Louisville, Ky., and Gainesville, Fla. Activists and government leaders are calling for more removals, while some counter protesters have organized to protect some monuments. Here is a brief summary of the monuments under attack — and those that aren´t. Monuments removed. The movement

Summertime, sweltering and stressful, makes our cold civil war feel hot. The madness and violence of last year crested in the summer, with the shootings of cops in Dallas and Baton Rouge. Now the dog days are here again, and with them a new spasm — white supremacists with tiki torches, antifa and the alt-right going at it, a white nationalist running down protesters, a little Weimar re-enactment in the streets of Charlottesville, Va. So while the president blathers about how some of the torchbearers were fine people, other people are talking about whether we could have a civil war for

The FBI has "reopened" its consideration of a request for records on the infamous 2016 tarmac meeting between then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton, the group behind that request told Fox News. American Center for Law and Justice President Jay Sekulow called the development a “positive sign,” in an interview Wednesday on “Fox & Friends.” Sekulow said the FBI sent him a letter saying it had reopened his Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the June 2016 meeting. At first, the FBI and DOJ said they did not have documents detailing the tarmac meet-up, before recently

The self-appointed ruling class is overflowing with egomaniacs and heartless operators who, oblivious to the irony of their own pouting, decry Trump’s “ego” and question his “heart.” Has America ever had to endure a more insufferable collection of frauds? When not sating themselves at Margaret Sanger award galas and Black Lives Matters powwows, they can be heard lecturing Americans on “racial healing” and a culture without violence. It would be a little easier to hear these disquisitions on nonviolence from brow-furrowing anchorettes and celebrity bloggers if many of them weren’t always obsessing over “reproductive rights.” When will these abortion supporters

State election officials still don’t know which 21 of their jurisdictions Russian hackers targeted, The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned. Secretaries of state — who are the top election officials in 40 states — told TheDCNF they were shocked to learn of the Russian hacking when Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials first divulged it at a June 21, 2017, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing. “We can’t find any secretaries of state who say they have been told they are part of this list of ‘targeted’ states.” said a spokeswoman for the National Association of Secretaries of

Nothing President Trump can say will satisfy the mob. Scheming since the morning after the November election to reverse the result, the mob is on a holy crusade to destroy Trump the interloper, and the president himself keeps assisting the project. He was at it again Tuesday, saying once more that “many sides” were responsible for the violence last week in Charlottesville, that two of the sides came after each other with blood in their eyes, eager for a fight. “They came at each other with clubs it was a horrible sight,” the president told reporters at a contentious press conference

President Trump should have left well enough alone. His Monday denunciation of costumed sheet-wearers and Nazi wanna-bes could have cleared the way for Americans of all stripes to focus their outrage on things that matter more than presidential words. That would be the violence that is infecting our politics and the frightening acceptance of it as the new normal. But Trump’s defiance yesterday is sure to keep the media pot boiling over his rhetoric instead of an ominous reality. Namely, that real protestors don’t carry baseball bats, crowbars and mace. Yet Saturday’s bloody clash in Charlottesville showed that many on

Jim Mattis, retired Marine four-star general, was the first person President Trump nominated to his cabinet. Mattis received nearly unanimous (99 to 1) bipartisan support for his nomination. He then received an extremely rare waiver of the guidelines that exclude recently active military leaders from the position of secretary of defense. It has been more than 60 years since the last such waiver. What could create such unprecedented unity, even enthusiasm, amid the hyper-partisan political rancor of 2017? This overwhelming support goes beyond enthusiasm for his record of military competence. His sometimes shocking public statements and quiet triumphs point to

The Ecuadorian Embassy in London is situated at the end of a wide brick lane, next to the Harrods department store, in Knightsbridge. Sometimes plainclothes police officers, or vans with tinted windows, can be found outside the building. Sometimes there are throngs of people around it. Sometimes there is virtually no one, which was the case in June, 2012, when Julian Assange, the publisher of WikiLeaks, arrived, disguised as a motorcycle courier, to seek political asylum. In the five years since then, he has not set foot beyond the Embassy. Nonetheless, he has become a global influence, proving that with

Unless you´ve been hiding under your bed -- which is a strategy I´m seriously considering -- you know that there was a pretty massive riot in Charlottesville, which led to at least one death (although some outlets are saying three because a police helicopter crashed at the same time) and a whole bunch of injuries. President Trump made a statement: We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides. It´s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going

Fox News´s Kat Timpf slammed President Trump on Tuesday for his "disgusting" press conference in which he again blamed "both sides" for the violence that occurred in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend, stepping back from his direct condemnation of white supremacist groups a day earlier. "It was one of the biggest messes I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe it happened," said Timpf, a co-host of “The Fox News Specialists.” “It is honestly crazy for me to have to comment on this right now because I’m still in the phase where I am wondering if it was actually real life —

Evidence is turning up from, of all places, the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as Breitbart and others, that this character, Jason Kessler, who organized the suspicious and supposed Alt-Right demonstration in Charlottesville, Va. that blew up in everyone´s face, is a cunning lefty holdover from the Occupy Wall Street movement and a former Barack Obama supporter. I smell Soros money, sabotage, and Democrat dirty tricks here. I´ve been suspicious of the nature of the violence at this supposed Alt-Right demonstration since the news first began breaking. It is no secret that radical elements in the Democrat left have

A crowd of ignorant protesters pulled down a bronze Confederate statue that stood before a county government building in Durham, North Carolina — the angry national backlash to the Charlottesville brouhaha over the Robert E. Lee monument. This is not how civil societies operate. And yet this is what the left has brought, and now cheers. What’s next — burning books with offensive content? Burning books written by those who used to own slaves? At the very least, museums will have to go. The problem with revising history based on a standard of “feeling offensive” — as this anti-Confederate craze is rooted — is that someone,

President Trump should have left well enough alone. His Monday denunciation of costumed sheet-wearers and Nazi wanna-bes could have cleared the way for Americans of all stripes to focus their outrage on things that matter more than presidential words. That would be the violence that is infecting our politics and the frightening acceptance of it as the new normal. But Trump’s defiance yesterday is sure to keep the media pot boiling over his rhetoric instead of an ominous reality. Namely, that real protestors don’t carry baseball bats, crowbars and mace. Yet Saturday’s bloody clash in Charlottesville showed that many on

Former presidential candidate and current Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich may be moving closer to mounting a primary challenge against President Trump in the 2020 election. Sources close to Kasich told Willie Geist of the "Today Show" there is growing a sense of "moral imperative" to run against Trump for the Republican nomination in 2020 following his controversial statements on the deadly protest in Charlottesville, Va. (Tweet) Kasich has long been critical of Trump. On Tuesday, Kasich criticized Trump´s Charlottesville comments, saying "there is no moral equivalency to Nazi sympathizers" following Trump´s tumultuous press conference. Kasich, who lost to Trump

Trump ignited a political firestorm yesterday during an impromptu press conference in which he said there was "blame on both sides" for the tragic events that occurred in Charlottesville over the weekend. Now, the discovery of a craigslist ad posted last Monday, almost a full week before the Charlottesville protests, is raising new questions over whether paid protesters were sourced by a Los Angeles based "public relations firm specializing in innovative events" to serve as agitators in counterprotests. The ad was posted by a company called "Crowds on Demand" and offered $25 per hour to "actors and photographers"

CNN host Wolf Blitzer said Thursday there would be questions if the Barcelona terror attack involving a van crashing into a group of people was a "copycat" of what happened in Charlottesville, Va. At least 13 people were killed and more than 50 were injured in Barcelona on Thursday when men rammed their van into a crowd of pedestrians at Las Ramblas, a popular tourism area in the city in northeastern Spain. The attack came five days after a man with white supremacist group ties was arrested for driving his car into a group of counter-protesters in Charlottesville, killing one

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has weighed in on the weekend´s violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, castigating Donald Trump without naming him. ´We can have no tolerance for an ideology of racial hatred. There are no good neo-nazis,´ McConnell said in a statement. The choice of words, while careful, appeared to push back against Trump´s claim on Tuesday that some ´very fine people´ were among a crowd of white supremacists who rallied in the college town. McConnell´s wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, stood next to Trump on Tuesday as he insisted both sides of the weekend´s clash bore some responsibility for

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina warned President Trump on Wednesday that his “words are dividing Americans, not healing them” in the wake of the bloody clashes in Virginia that has sparked a national conversation about white supremacists and race. Mr. Graham also vowed that Republicans will “fight back against the idea that the party of Lincoln has a welcome mat out for the David Dukes of the world.” “Through his statements yesterday, President Trump took a step backward by again suggesting there is moral equivalency between the white supremacist neo-Nazis and KKK members who attended the Charlottesville rally and people like

As James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger famously observed, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.” On Tuesday evening, three prominent Republicans — Senator John McCain, Senator Marco Rubio, and 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney — endorsed the left-wing media’s preferred narrative and embraced the masked thugs of Antifa as heroes. McCain and Romney used almost identical language, bending their knees to the media narrative that only two factions were present in Charlottesville during the awful events of last weekend: white supremacist Nazis and “Americans standing up to defy hate and bigotry.”

In the midst of the maelstrom of breaking news of the past several days, the outlines of a big story affecting the future of the Fox News Channel are beginning to emerge. They involve a major makeover of Fox News´s ailing prime-time schedule and a rising new star, Eboni K. Williams. After the dust settles, Williams, whose current show, The Fox News Specialists, looks as though it´s headed for oblivion after the coming shake-up, may wind up on the fast track to cable news stardom.On Monday, August 14, Matt Drudge let the cat out of the bag, as he occasionally

NEW YORK- They wash their hands of neo-Nazis and wag their fingers at leftists. They denounce a press corps they see as biased and controversies they view as manufactured. But in the frenzied blame game over the deadly violence at a rally of white supremacists, Donald Trump´s loyal base is happy to absolve the president himself. Even as Trump´s zig-zag response to the weekend bloodshed in Charlottesville, Virginia, has brought criticism from some Republican lawmakers, many men and women who helped put him in office remain unmoved by the latest uproar. "He has done nothing to turn me away from